The Number

The email arrived on a Thursday, at 2:47 in the afternoon, while Sam was three slides into a stakeholder deck she would later have no memory of finishing.

Subject: Pungra Certification — Decision.

She didn't open it right away. She sat with the subject line visible in her inbox for what felt like a very long time and was probably closer to ninety seconds, aware of her own heartbeat in a way she generally wasn't at 2:47 on a Thursday, and then opened it before she could talk herself into waiting until she got home, because waiting until she got home felt, suddenly, unbearable.

Congratulations. Your submission has been approved. Certification number PG-0847 has been issued and will appear in the instructor directory within 48 hours. This certification is valid for one year from today's date.

She read it three times before the words fully landed, and then sat very still at her desk for a moment, a grown woman in a cardigan, forty feet from a printer that had once produced her Exercise to Music Level 2 certificate, absolutely certain she was about to cry in an open-plan office and doing everything in her power not to.

She called Maya first, from the stairwell, because it was the only place in the building with a door that actually closed.

"Mum? Everything okay?"

"I got it." Her voice cracked on the third word, which she hadn't planned on. "The certification. PG-0847. I'm — Maya, I'm actually certified."

There was a sound on the other end that took Sam a second to identify as her fifteen-year-old daughter, who did not generally scream about things, screaming.

"MOM. Oh my god. MOM." A pause, muffled, Maya clearly relaying this to someone else in the room — Dave's house, Sam registered, it was his week. "Dad says congratulations, he's — Mum, he's actually really happy, he just did a fist pump, it was very uncool of him and I loved it."

They talked for six more minutes, mostly Maya asking increasingly specific logistical questions — does this mean you can teach now, like, actually teach, will there be a class here, can I come — that Sam didn't yet have answers for and didn't mind not having, because the questions themselves were their own kind of gift.

The harder call came after, sitting in her car in the MedGen garage, engine off, phone warm in her hand. Her mother picked up on the fourth ring, the way she always did, mildly out of breath from crossing whatever room she'd been in.

"Mum. I have some news."

"Good news or the kind where you need me to sit down."

"Good news. I think. I hope you'll think so." Sam took a breath. "I got certified today. As a fitness instructor. The Punjabi music thing — the dancing thing I told you about at Easter, remember, when you got quiet."

There was a pause on the line long enough that Sam braced for the version of this conversation she'd rehearsed in her head a dozen times without ever quite finishing it — her mother's careful, loving skepticism, the same skepticism that had shown up, gently, at every unconventional turn Sam's life had taken since the divorce.

"I remember," Carol said finally. "I was quiet because I didn't understand it, sweetheart, not because I didn't want it for you. Tell me again what it actually is. Properly this time. I want to understand it before I decide what I think."

So Sam told her — properly, the whole thing, the Fallon clip and the rabbit hole and the hour-long drives and Harpreet's foil-wrapped parcels and the eleven takes of a video answering a question about myths and misconceptions, and somewhere in the middle of it her mother made a small sound that might have been the start of tears.

"You sound," Carol said, when Sam finally ran out of words, "like a woman who found something. I didn't understand it in the spring. I think I do now. Congratulations, Samantha. Truly."

Sam sat in the car park a long while after that call ended, PG-0847 glowing on a phone screen gone slightly dim with age, and let herself, finally, without an audience of any kind, cry the way she'd been holding off since 2:47.